BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
Mmmmm...thrall-chicks...

  When this movie came out in 1992, everybody I knew figured I'd be all gung-ho for it.  The reason?  Lots n' lots of impalements.  For some reason, at the time, everybody associated me with the act of impaling.  And in junior high, everybody thought I was a pyromaniac. Don't as me how this goofy shit gets started, I'm in the dark here.

I read Stoker's novel a couple of months ago, and to be perfectly honest, I don't really remember much of it.  So watching it tonight, I couldn't really tell what departed from the book, despite many moments loudly ringing bells in my head.

We're first shown 14th-century Transylvania in turmoil, beset by invading Turks.  Clad in grotesque red armor that makes him look like a man without skin, Vlad Dracula (Gary Oldman, in a role almost given to Viggo Mortensen), goes off to kick some Turk.  Kick Turk he does, but comes home to find his wife dead.  None too pleased, he renounces Christ and God, vows to return from the grave, and drinks the blood that miraculously wells up from the cross he skewers in his act of frenzied blasphemy.

Fast-forward four centuries.  Keanu Reeves plays Jonathan Harker, with an idiot drawl of an accent that makes Kevin Costner's Robin Hood sound like British royalty (check out the way he says "bloody wolves chasing me through some blue inferno").  Harker is given transport to Transylvania to secure the purchase of a madhouse and ten London homes by a mysterious individual referred to as "D" - it's a good bet that "D" doesn't stand for "Dave".  In the movie's most memorable sequence (shame to use it up so soon), he is only taken so far by his civilian driver, and picked up by a creepy carriage, its driver clad in demonic garb, its horses uniformly black, somehow holding back the wolves all around.  He meets with Dracula (whose shadow has no particular relationship to the actual position and action of his body), and stays for about a month, while his loved ones understandably worry and Drac plans his move off of the continent.

Top dollar must have gone to the cast, which is a shame because most of them suck.  I can't express enough just how lame Reeves is; it says volumes about the poor guy when Ted Logan remains after all these years his most convincing character.  Winona Ryder as Mina is...I've never been a fan of Winona Ryder, and this didn't change my mind.  Cary Elwes is terrible, because Cary Elwes is ALWAYS terrible, no matter how little a script demands from him.  What's with the cowboy?  There's a cowboy in this movie. (I'm aware that there was a cowboy in the book, but please, if anything from the book needed to go, it's him) And more important of all, despite delivering the best evil laugh I've ever heard, Oldman is a big disappointment as Dracula.  Between his hysterical hairdo and stilted, trying-WAY-too-hard delivery, he seems like a cartoon.

Tom Waits, on the other hand, is an inspired choice for the mad, fly-munching Renfeld, though his role is perilously close to nothing.  And there's no way Anthony Hopkins could possibly screw up a role like Van Helsing which requires him to ham it up as violently as possible.  (trying to console Mina as to her friend's peaceful passing, he says "We cut off her head, put a stake through her heart and burned it, and then she found peace.")

The movie certainly drips with a more-goth-than-goth visual and sonic sensibility.  Coppola's giving it his all, even when he's giving it the wrong things (the repeated images of faces in the sky are cheesy to begin with, and only get worse as they're repeated).  Most of the time, it's a gorgeous film to look at (even while I find it easy to ignore what's actually happening on screen), although Coppola makes some weird decisions.  What's with that scene in London which at first appears to be shot with a color version of the oldest movie camera ever invented, played back too fast and everything?  I could say a whole lot of "What's with...?" questions about Coppola's various techniques and tricks, but we'd be here all night.

It's hard not to like the scene where Harker is seduced/chomped by Drac's three gorgeous thrall-chicks.  But overall, there's about as much narrative drive as a trip to the supermarket - hey, there's something I remember from the novel.

Yeah, it's fitfully enjoyable overall, but nothing really all that hot.  For that matter, I found the myriad of spoofs the cropped up all over the place (like that one Halloween Simpsons' episode, or Sinbad's hilarious Bram Stoker's Blacula skit on Saturday Night Live) to be generally more entertaining.  But neither of those had those hot thrall-chicks.

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